This was discussed a bit last year when nV announce they would be moving to a schedule of about 1 or 2 drivers per year. And I think the landscape has changed a bit since then with the addition of SLI for one.
While there are constantly BETA drivers being release by nV, alot of people don't trust them because they may have used a beta once and had a bad experience or they may not be comfortable with beta software. This means that for many people patches, performance boosts, and feature updates will go unused until the official drivers are release. This causes problems for only the general user, not for enthusiast/power users. If SLI was for the general poppulace, then waiting for the official drivers would've caused them alot of headaches compared to those who jumped on the betas earlier. Even now the temp reading error is only a small issue, but for those sticking to the official drivers who knows how long they'll have to wait for a correction?
Initially I thought this would impact the FX owners the most because they rely heavily on the optimized run-time compiler for their parts to remain close to the competition in games and deliver playable frames with all the features. While I thought infrequent driver releases would hurt that it seems less important because nV has pretty much completely abandoned that generation (like ATI did with many of their legacy products [read R2xx generation]), and so frequency of driver updates wouldn't matter if they are simply being ignored more frquently.
While one might worry about SERIOUS problems not being adressed, it appears that nV is at least taking somewhat of the '<i>well it's necessary let's get it out there</i>' approach, in that they will ensure that critical fixes/updates get pushed a little faster into the system and not simply wait for theier 'driver launch event' as it were.
For the enthusiast it makes little difference, there are always the betas flying around out there, and thus nV avoids the cost of certification, but there are risks involved but we're usually willing to take them and quickly aware of any issues.
I prefer ATI's style of release and think it's a little more desireable, but both methods seem to work for the community. Another part of my thinking is that if you go through the cost/time of certification then you would likely pay a little more attention to detail and compatibility, but that's just an assumption based on the cost, but that may be written off as the cost of doing business and not a motivator. And when ATI needs a quick fix they release betas too, like they did for D3.
I'd only be worried if they ONLY released the official and the official ones took that long to come out.
- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red> GA to SK
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